‘Who said I’m not helping myself? I’ve just not found what I’m looking for.’
‘What are you looking for? Do you even know?’
‘Well, I know what I don’t want.’
Dating in London was a dance, you were either a maestro or a novice, and I was a certified postulant, banging at the gates to be let in. I was ignorant of the basics: choosing where to hang out, creating the right vibes, dressing to be desired. In part, it was due to my Nigerianness. I was not like the born and bred Nigerian Brits, aware of social references and innuendos, and I refused to act like some other Nigerians, pretending they’d sung ‘God Save the Queen’ all their lives and never taken a plane from Lagos to Heathrow.
My phone rang as I bent in front of my refrigerator with the dan dan mian I no longer felt like eating.
‘Nwakaego!’ Eriife screamed from the other end.
The desolation dissipated for the time being.
‘This woman, why are you screaming? You think we’re still in university ehn?’ I said, automatically slipping off the veneer I wore at work and donning ehns, ahs and ohs of Nigerian speak. ‘Soye must not be at home for you to be shouting like this.’
‘Ah. He is o. In fact, I’m tired of him,’ she joked.
‘How can you be tired of what others are praying for?’
We fell into easy conversation, even though it had been years since we were face to face. Her politician husband had received a promotion within his party and was getting ever closer to his dreams of one day becoming president. I burrowed into the warmth of my sofa, the dan dan mian forgotten by my side.
‘I saw your boyfriend today o. In fact, that is why I called,’ Eriife said after we’d spoken for a while.
I stiffened. ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ I retorted.
She hissed. ‘Well, have you had another one since you abandoned him?’
‘I’m sure he’s a pastor now like his father,’ I said, avoiding the question.
She pretended not to notice. ‘No, he’s into fintech now, and it looks like he’s doing well. He came to the conference in a jeep.’
‘That’s nice,’ I mumbled.
She laughed a knowing laugh. ‘I know you won’t ask, but he didn’t have a ring on his finger. Maybe he’s still waiting for you – you know you broke his heart, Nwakaego.’
‘Why are you calling my full name? Call me Ego,’ I deflected.
‘You’ve been over there for too long. See how you’re pronouncing your own name. Ego, like those British people. In fact, come home, come and marry him. How long are you planning to stay there?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘See your mouth like “come home”. What will I do there? I have a job here, a life.’
‘You can always practise your law; you can just renew your licence or whatever you people do. You’ll be like an expatriate with your London experience, you can get a big position at one of these international firms.’
I chuckled. ‘You think it’s that easy? I read the news o. Nigeria is not that straightforward.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. But things can only get better. You know elections are coming in a few months, Nigerians are angry, we’re ready to change this government.’ Eriife lowered her tone. I imagined her looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening. ‘Don’t say I told you, but my husband’s party has a lot of plans, if everything goes well…’ She let the promise hang.
‘Madam president!’ I hailed. ‘I’m loyal to your government.’
She chuckled. ‘When will you ever be serious? Anyways, you get my message. Come back. There’s no place like home.’
The call ended an hour later with promises on my end to send the shoes she’d ordered online, and to consider her words seriously.
But in my sleep, there were no wistful images of home, nor of friends and family left behind, not even of him. There was only my father.
2
Witch!
‘WITCH!’
That was what my father called my mother when he was angry, and he was angry often. His temper came like an unseasonable storm, triggered by the slightest disturbance, roiling and cataclysmic, destroying everything in its path.
‘Witch!’ The word reverberated off the pillars and through the walls of our home, surrounding us, imprisoning us in its echo. My mother ran, fruitlessly, from it.
‘Ego, please take your siblings upstairs,’ she would plead, her voice quivering as she glanced anxiously behind her, anticipating my father’s presence. He was never far behind.
My father was handsome. As a young man, he’d been the one the women in church whispered about and fluttered their eyelashes at as they furiously swished their handfans against their faces after service. Years later, women would still stare and tilt their necks high to catch his unusually light brown eyes in spite of the gold band on his ring finger. My primary school class teacher always had some new insight about me she needed to share with him whenever he happened to pick me up from school. To my mother, whom she saw often, she only ever said a tight-lipped, ‘Ego is doing well.’
When he wasn’t my father, he was Chief Dr Chigozie Azubuike, the charismatic CEO of one of the country’s largest trading companies. ‘Leading from the Front: Transforming the Private Sector’, as a business magazine whose cover he’d graced put it. He’d worn a designer suit for that feature, ordered directly from Milan. You could tell from the pictures that the photographer had been enamoured of him; everyone was enamoured of him – this extraordinary man who’d come from absolutely nothing to build a business that stretched the length and breadth of the country. At the soirées he held at our home, he charmed the nation’s most powerful with his disarming smile and swaggering confidence. And then there was my mother, standing beside him, as she’d done from the very beginning, through it all.
But when the doors closed behind his guests, the caterers packed away their chafing dishes and the musicians and photographers turned off their expensive equipment, the clouds would gather and the storm would begin. Sometimes it was a shattered lamp or broken vase, other times, a fractured bone or swollen cheek; we were never left unscathed.
Each time, as my mother scrambled, pleaded and cowered to protect us, I would stare emptily at the black-and-white picture that hung in our living room, radiating charm and suave that matched Father’s, the genesis of our predicament – a photo of the man my mother was in love with.
My mother Obianuju Azubuike née Nwaike was in love with a ghost: my great uncle Ikenna who’d disappeared during the Nigerian civil war, and it was for this reason she would end up with my father.
Her meeting my father was fate, or at least that was how my mother described it before her mouth no longer turned up in a smile when she spoke of their marriage. My father was a struggling reporter at a local newspaper, and she was a final year student at the University of Lagos. It was a Sunday in August 1978, eight years since the end of the civil war and eleven years since my mother last saw her uncle, Ikenna.
